Atlas Six (Atlas Series, 1)
Atlas Six: Part 8 – Chapter 38

Ezra Mikhail Fowler was born as the earth was dying. There had been an entire fuss of it on the news that year, about the carbon crisis and how little time the ozone had left, leaving an entire generation to turn to their therapists and proclaim a collective, widespread existential disengagement. The United States had been awash in fires and floods for months, with only half the country believing they had any hand in its demolishment. Even the ones who still believed in a vengeful God had failed to see the signs.

Still, things would have to get much worse before they got better. Only when time and breathable air and potable water were running out did someone, somewhere, decide to change their stance. Magical technology that had once been bought and sold by governments in secret transitioned to private hands, allowing it to be bought and sold via trade secret instead. It healed some of the earth’s viruses, provided some renewable energy, repairing enough of the damage caused by industrialization and globalization and all the other -ations that the world could successfully go on a bit longer without any drastic change in attitude or behaviors. Politicians politicked as usual, which meant that for every incremental step forward there was still a looming end in sight. But it was delayed, and that was what was important. Any senator could tell you that.

Ezra, meanwhile, grew up in an unfortunate corner of Los Angeles. The sort that was too far east to have ever laid eyes on the ocean, and that also believed unquestionably that a river was nothing more than a slow trickle above cement. His was a generally fatherless nation, a community of misfortune for which mothers were primary caregivers and breadwinners as well, albeit for very little bread. Ezra had been a tribesman of his local multigenerational matriarchy until the age of twelve, when his mother died as the result of a shooting while at worship inside her temple. Ezra had been there, but also not there. He remembered the details of the event clearly for multiple reasons, her death notwithstanding: One, he and his mother had had an argument that morning about him running off somewhere the day before, which he assured her he hadn’t done. Two, it had been his first experience with a door.

Perhaps if he’d been braver or more aware of what he was doing he might have held his mother’s hand more tightly. As it was, the sound of the automatic rifle had sent him careening backwards in space, to the point where he wondered if he had actually been shot. He was familiar with the idea of a live shooter, having been made to run drills for it in school, but death itself remained a foreign concept. In Ezra’s mind, the idea of a bullet piercing any part of him was just like this had been: a collapse, his ears ringing, the entirety of the world tilting sideways for a moment. When the sensation cleared, though, Ezra realized he was either dead or very, very much alive.

When he opened his eyes the temple was quiet, eerily so. He walked around to the spot where his mother had been, feeling at the edges of the wood for evidence of bullets. There were none, and he thought perhaps he had made it happen by magic. Perhaps he had fixed everything, done it over, and now everything would be fine? He went home to replace his mother asleep on the sofa, still in her nurse’s uniform. He went to bed. He woke up. The sun shone.

Then things began to happen oddly. The same burnt toast for breakfast as yesterday, the same terrible jokes on the daily morning news. His mother yelled at him for running off the day before, disappearing and coming home after she’d been asleep. She dragged him to the bathroom, shouting for him to wash his hair and get dressed for temple. No, no, he said instantly, no we can’t go there, Mom listen to me it’s important, but she was insistent. Put your good shoes on Ezra Mikhail, wash your hair and let’s go.

When the shooter appeared again, Ezra finally confirmed with certainty his suspicion that he had somehow gone into the past, which at first he took as a blessing. He tried several times to save his mother, thinking it his divinely appointed task. Each time things repeated as they had before, the situation altering like puzzle pieces to form the prophetic picture on the box. Exhausted, he eventually fell through the little vacancy in time for the thirteenth round and stayed there, and then, for the first time, he tried to open a new crevice for himself, something to lead him elsewhere. When he stepped out, he was three weeks beyond his mother’s funeral—the furthest he could take himself at the time.

Social services soon arrived to gather him into custody. Perhaps because he had already watched his mother die twelve times, Ezra numbly went.

It’s not a secret that the foster care system leaves much to be desired. Ezra had vowed never to run away again, never to tell a soul about what he’d seen and done, but life has a way of breaking its promises to children. Within a year, he was learning to use the doors with some regularity, securing control over their outcome. He did not age as time passed if he didn’t choose to, moving fluidly through it instead, and by his sixteenth birthday he was only fifteen and one day, having skipped through any instances of the time he couldn’t otherwise abide.

At seventeen (or so), Ezra was offered a scholarship to the New York University of Magical Arts, which was the first time he fully understood that he was not alone in what he could do. True, he was the only one who had access to the doors specifically, but for the first time, he understood that he was not the only magician in the world—no, medeian, they told him. It was a new word, unfamiliar on his tongue.

So what was he? Not a physicist, not exactly. He was definitely opening and closing tiny, Ezra-sized wormholes to navigate through time, that much seemed clear, but his magic was limited and self-concentrated. It was a unique power, dangerous.

Keep it quiet, his professors advised. You never know what sort of people will try to mess with time. Never the kind with good intentions.

Dutifully, Ezra kept his abilities a secret, or tried to. Eventually, though, the Alexandrian Society found him out.

It was a tempting offer. (It was always tempting; power always is.) What was particularly interesting to Ezra, though, were the others, his fellow initiates, or the four who would become his fellow initiates after one of them had been eliminated. Ezra was introverted by nature—a combination of poverty, inexplicable power, and his mother’s untimely death had combined to make him relatively standoffish—but there was one other initiate with whom he instantly shared a bond.

Atlas Blakely was a rakish vagrant with wild natural hair and an insuppressible grin. A “bi’ o’ London rough,” as he called himself, who laughed so loudly it regularly frightened pigeons. He was wolfish and lively and so sharp it sometimes made others uneasy, but Ezra warmed to him immediately, and Atlas to him. They shared something they gradually deduced was hunger, though for what was initially unclear. Ezra’s theory was that they were merely cut from the same indigent cloth, the easy cast-offs of a dying earth. The other four candidates were educated, well-born, and therefore bred with a comfortable cynicism, a posh sort of gloom. Ezra and Atlas, on the other hand were sunspots. They were stars who refused to die out.

It was Atlas who first sorted out the death clause of the Society’s initiation, reading it somewhere in someone’s thoughts or whatever he did that Atlas insisted was not actually mind reading. “It’s good and rightly fucked, innit?” he said to Ezra, his accent thickly unintelligible at times. “We’re supposed to kill someone? Thanks, mate, no thanks.” (No fanks, as it sounded to Ezra.)

“The books, though,” Ezra said, quietly buzzing. The two of them shared a fondness for intoxicants, mortal drugs when they could get it. It made the doors easier to access for Ezra, and Atlas got tired of hearing the sound of other people’s thoughts. Gave him a bleedin’ migraine, he said.

“The damn books. A whole library. All those books.”

“Books ain’t enough, bruv,” grunted Atlas sagely.

But fundamentally, Ezra disagreed. “This Society is something,” he said. “It’s not just the books, it’s the questions, the answers. It’s all something more than nothing.” (Drugs made this theory difficult to communicate.) “What we need is to get ourselves in, but then get on top somehow. Power begets power and all that.”

It was clear that Atlas did not understand him, so he went on.

“Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra, going on to describe how few people were capable of actually understanding time and how much of it there was, and how much a person could gain if they could just hold on a little longer. If they could starve long enough to get by on almost nothing, if they fed themselves only little by little, in the end they would be the ones to last. The patient shall inherit the earth, or something like that. Killing was bad, sure, but worse it was unnecessary, inefficient. What had Ezra’s existence ever been aside from a recurring loophole to the nature of life itself?

And besides, they still wanted the damn books, so from there they made a plan: it was Atlas who would do the waiting, Ezra who would disappear. They could fake his death, Ezra suggested, and thus with one person out of the running, there would be no need for either of them to kill anyone. The other initiates didn’t like Ezra, anyway. He was too secretive, they didn’t trust him. They also didn’t know what he could do, and in the end, that was clearly for the best.

So Ezra opened a door and went forward five years, meeting Atlas in the cafe they’d agreed on before he left. In what felt like a matter of hours to Ezra, Atlas had advanced to twenty-eight and lost the accent, but not the swagger. He slid into the chair opposite Ezra and grinned. “I’m in,” he said.

“They bought it?” The Society knew what Ezra could do, but still. Who were they to say he wasn’t dead?

“Yes.”

“So what’d they do with… you know. Me?”

“Same thing they do to every eliminated candidate. Erased you,” Atlas said. “Like you never existed.”

Perfect. “And even without the ritual…?”

Atlas raised a glass. “The Society is dead; long live the Society.”

Continuity into perpetuity. Time, as ever, went on.

“So what next?” asked Ezra, blazing with the prospects yet to come.

They kept their meetings up sparingly, a year at a time. Neither of them wanted Ezra to age unnecessarily; for him, time passed differently, but it was still passing. They were waiting for the six, Atlas said. The right six, the perfect collection, including Ezra. Atlas, meanwhile, would have to work his way up, to ensure he would be the next Caretaker of the archives (theirs had been quite old already, which aside from wealth beyond measure made an excellent qualification for impending retirement), and then once Atlas managed it, he would be able to start hand-selecting the candidates himself. He would choose the perfect team of five—one to die, of course, at the initiates’ choosing, though even that unlucky soul would be someone carefully and thoughtfully selected—and then Ezra, the sixth, would be at the helm of it.

The perfect team for what?

“For anything,” Atlas said. “For everything.”

He meant: Let’s take this bloody mess and all its damn books and do something that’s never been done.

They drafted imaginary plans for it at length: a physicist who could approximate what Ezra could do, but bigger. Wormholes, black holes, space travel, time travel. Someone who could see quanta, manipulate it, understand it, use it. (Was that possible? Surely it must be, said Atlas.) Someone to help them power it, like a battery. Another telepath to be Atlas’ right hand, to be his eyes and ears so he could finally rest his own. What were they building? Neither of them were entirely sure, but they knew they had the instincts, the guts, the painstaking deliberation.

“I found something,” Atlas said, earlier than anticipated. Just the one, an animator.

(Animator?)

“Just trust me,” said Atlas, who was entering his late thirties now and beginning to dress in suits, concealing his true origins behind a posher accent and better clothes. “I’ve got a feeling about this one, bruv.”

It was around this time when the initial euphoria of the plan had begun to wane, and Ezra was starting to question his usefulness. The plan relied mostly on Atlas’ gut, which was certainly something Ezra trusted, but all the darting in and out of time and meeting wherever Atlas happened to be in the world wasn’t exactly the same as being present. Ezra wasn’t contributing anything, wasn’t part of it, not really. Go back to NYUMA, Atlas suggested, see what you can replace, you’re only twenty-three now (or something) and you still look young. Besides, Atlas said with a laugh, you’re too American to blend in anywhere else.

So Ezra went.

Unfortunately, in order for Ezra to see anything worth replaceing, time had to slow down. He had to experience time linearly again, remaining in one chronological place and putting down the half-hearted roots of a passably unthreatening persona. He resented it, replaceing existence slightly dull without the one thing that had always felt natural to him, but before he could abandon his efforts and move on, the banality of his existence led to a position as a resident advisor in a freshman dorm and then, unexpectedly, he had found something.

“You need them both,” Ezra told Atlas after seeing Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona face off in the row of the century. “When the time comes, you absolutely must take them both.”

“But they have the same specialty,” Atlas pointed out, looking doubtful. His hair had started to grey at the temples a few years before, so by then he had opted to shave it off. “Don’t you want to be initiated? You were always meant to be the sixth.”

Ezra paused to consider it. He had always intended to be initiated someday, but suddenly the formality seemed unimportant.

“You’ll have to have both,” he repeated, adding, “Nor do I think you could conceivably get one without the other.”

Atlas mulled it over, considering the idea from all angles.

“They’re… physicists, you said?”

“They’re mutants,” Ezra said. (High praise, in his opinion.) “Absolute mutants.”

“Well, keep an eye on them,” said Atlas thoughtfully. “I’ve got something else I’m working on right now.”

Easy enough to do. Assuming the unremarkable role of a student two years above them despite being born nearly twenty-five years before meant that Libby in particular proved herself to be intriguing to Ezra. That wasn’t an interesting story, particularly after knowing it would eventually sour.

As for Nico, they never quite got on. Ezra already knew he was giving up his spot for Nico, or for whomever Atlas found to serve one of the more necessary roles among the six. (A naturalist, Atlas said. What did they need plants for? scoffed Ezra, only to be met with Never mind about the plants, I’ve got a feeling, you’ll see.) At least Nico made things easier by rendering the offer impossible for Libby to refuse.

It was the year leading up to their initiation that finally opened Ezra’s eyes to the possibility that he may not have been starving so much as fasting. Now that Libby and Nico were gone, Ezra was left performing his cultivated mundanity for a fleet of empty seats. Worse, he had underestimated the discomfort of no longer being integral to Atlas’ plan.

“Nonsense, of course you are,” said Atlas. “In fact, I suspect you can do the ritual this year after all.”

“How?” Ezra asked irritably. Boredom stung, it itched somewhere intangibly, like a cramp in his calf. “Five are initiated, not six.”

“Yes, but I suspect I was wrong about Parisa,” Atlas said.

Ezra frowned. “Is she not as good as you thought?”

“No, in terms of ability she’s precisely what I’d hoped.” A pause. “But I suspect she’s a problem.”

“What sort of problem?” Ezra was unaware Atlas had any of those. As far as he knew, everything was going swimmingly without him. Hence the boredom.

“A problem.” Atlas sipped his tea. “I can convince her to get the others to kill Callum, at least.”

“Which one, the empath?”

“Yes.” That was always the one meant to die; even the perfect group of candidates would have to lose a member, after all. In Atlas’ eyes—and Ezra agreed—Callum was the equivalent of a nuclear code, and ridding the world of him was a favor to humanity. “Then you can have Parisa’s spot.”

“Oh yes of course, just kill her and take her spot, everything all neat and tidy,” Ezra said, waiting for a laugh that didn’t come.

Atlas sipped his tea again, and Ezra blinked.

“What?”

No reply.

“Atlas,” he growled. “Why on earth would I do that?”

“She slept with your girlfriend, for one thing,” Atlas offered with a misbegotten smile.

Which was not an answer, so Ezra rolled his eyes.

“Libby doesn’t know a thing about me. Bit hypocritical, don’t you think, if I held that particular blemish against her?”

“Regardless, you know there’s a bonding aspect to initiation. You’ll have to become part of them somehow if you plan to take their initiation oath. Sacrifice will do the trick.”

“And if I don’t want to be initiated?”

Atlas’ cup paused partway to his lips. “What?”

“I don’t see the point,” Ezra said restlessly. “You’re here, aren’t you, with me? What do I need to be part of the Society for? I’ve been on your side since the beginning.”

“Yes, and it’s been exceedingly helpful,” said Atlas, setting his cup to the side.

There was something about the foreignness of the motion—Atlas had never liked tea, preferring extreme intoxication instead—that made Ezra wonder whether he really knew Atlas Blakely at all. He certainly had at one point, but over two decades had passed since then, and Ezra had missed them. What might have happened to Atlas’ mind, to his convictions, to his soul? What had initiation into the Society done to him?

So Ezra decided to do something he had never bothered with doing before.

He opened a door to the distant future.

This was not as exciting a thing as it sounded, because the future could always be changed. True, there were some unalterable events, but in general Ezra had learned to take his distant doors as a pseudo-reliable astrological reading: likely to happen, but not guaranteed. So long as he did not remain there, he wasn’t bound to the consequences of anything he saw. His presence, if he did not disrupt anything, was as forgettable as the motion of a single grain of sand.

But what he discovered discomfited him intensely. Because what Ezra saw—the conclusion of his and Atlas Blakely’s plan—was almost certainly the end of the world.

“Let’s make a new one,” Atlas had said once. Not long ago, in Ezra’s memory. Twenty years in Atlas Blakely’s, and therefore perhaps long enough for him to believe Ezra might have forgotten what he said. “This one’s shitty, mate, it’s gone and lost the plot completely. No more fixing, no more tinkering around with broken parts. When one ecosystem fails, nature makes a new one. Nature, or whoever’s in charge. That’s how the species survives.”

He had turned his head, locking his dark gaze on Ezra’s.

“Let’s be gods, bruv,” Atlas said.

At the time, Ezra had blamed it on the drugs. But then he saw Tristan Caine inside one of his doors, traversing time itself on the wards Ezra had helped put in place, and he understood for the first time that Atlas Blakely had already built the perfect team without him.

“What is it Tristan can do?” Ezra asked casually on their next meeting. “You never told me.”

“Did I not?” said Atlas, lifting his cup to his lips.

Ezra, irritated, knocked the tea out of his hands. “You know you didn’t, Atlas—”

“Getting cold feet, old friend?” Atlas murmured, giving Ezra a thin smile as he waved a hand, returning the cup to its original state. “I imagine you may replace yourself less devoted to our goals than you once were. Perhaps,” he said, in English so falsely aristocratic he might as well have fucked the queen, “because you’ve made no sacrifices to get here.”

“Me? Atlas,” Ezra snapped. “This was always part of the plan—”

“Yes,” Atlas agreed, “but while I’ve spent the last quarter of a century getting older, you’ve remained a child, haven’t you, Ezra? We erased you, remade you, to the point where your stakes don’t exist. You,” he said with accusation, or possibly disappointment, “can’t see the way the game has changed.”

“I’m a child?” Ezra echoed, astounded. “Have you forgotten that I did your dirty work for you?”

“I believe I thanked you for that several times over,” Atlas reminded him. “And I offered you a seat at the table, did I not?”

“Only because you want me to take out another obstacle to you—and what’s wrong with Parisa, anyway?” Ezra demanded, bristling. “What threat is she to you?”

“No threat,” Atlas said. “Just… not the ally I’d hoped she’d be.”

The inadequacy of his response pricked like a needle, and Ezra stared at him.

“We started all this because we agreed this Society was fucked,” he said flatly.

“Yes,” Atlas agreed.

“And now?”

“Still fucked, as you put it,” said Atlas. “But this time, I can fix it. We,” he amended. “We can fix it, if you’re willing to see things as I see them.”

When one ecosystem fails, nature makes a new one.

That’s how the species survives.

The silence between them hollowed out and refilled with a new, tactile wave of doubt.

“The archives would never give you what you want,” Ezra said to Atlas in a low voice. “You can’t hide your intentions from the library itself.”

Silence.

“Are you using someone else to do it?”

“Either you’re in, Ezra, or you’re not,” Atlas told him, grimly exasperated.

“Of course I’m in,” Ezra said. “I’ve never not been in.”

And he hadn’t.

Not before then.

“So then it’s simple, isn’t it? You’ll see what they’re all capable of,” Atlas told him. “Open up a space for yourself among the six and it’s yours, all of it. I wouldn’t deny you any of it.”

Ezra knew better than to question him, even inside his own head.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine, get Parisa to kill Callum and I’ll deal with the rest.”

“Does Libby suspect anything?” asked Atlas.

No. No, he would make sure of it.

“I’ll keep her close,” Ezra said, having once mistaken that for something that could be done.

But truthfully he knew it couldn’t. The more Ezra had pushed her, coaxed her, worshipfully tried to persuade her of his devotion the way he assumed she would want to be loved—the more he hoped to remain inside Atlas’ confidence by maintaining Libby’s—the further she got from him, growing more distant each time they spoke. Ezra had wanted an alliance of sorts, anticipating that Libby would trust him enough to allow insight to Atlas’ plans even if Society rules precluded them. He clung to their years of companionship, their one-sided trust, and set himself to the task of distant espionage, hoping to rely on the one person whose morality he had always assumed would persist, even if their relationship did not. But Libby had pushed back, fruitlessly mistrusting, aimlessly angry.

“I’m not yours,” she said, and drew a line between them, closing the door on his access to her life.

So now, without Libby or even the promise of her, Ezra had no choice but to do something drastic. If he wanted to make sure Atlas Blakely’s plans never came to pass, then he would have to neutralize the Society on his own.

What he needed first was a way to take one of Atlas’ pieces off the board.

Breaking in would be the easy part. Twenty years ago, Ezra had quietly built a failsafe into the wards, precisely his own size and shape, for which no succeeding class of initiates would know to prevent. He could slip easily through it, falling through a dimension no one else could see, but what to do upon arrival was another matter; a troubling one.

Ezra knew, to some extent, which of the six mattered to Atlas and which ones didn’t. Libby, Nico, and Reina were part of the same triumvirate of power, and therefore Atlas would need all three. Tristan… there was something about Tristan that Atlas wasn’t telling him, which made Tristan possibly the lynchpin of Atlas’ plan.

Whichever candidate Ezra chose, Atlas would need to believe they were dead.

An illusion?

No, something better. Something convincing.

Something expensive.

“I know someone who can help you,” came back once Ezra sent feelers around, reaching out to whatever he could replace among less law-abiding circles. A mermaid, they said, though the term was slung around with a derogatory aftertaste. “It’ll cost you, but if you can pay…”

“I can pay,” Ezra said.

(He could easily rob a bank in the past and come back to the future scot-free.)

It was someone known only as the Prince who, via the mermaid, gave Ezra the animation. It was sickening and faceless, expressionless and limp. Just a generic, unremarkable diorama of a corpse that had encountered a violent end.

“You’ll have to give it a face,” the mermaid said, her voice shrill and high, like glass breaking. The sound of it set off something in Ezra’s inner ear, leaving him temporarily straining for balance. “It will have to replicate someone you know well enough to complete the animation. Someone whose every expression and motion you know intimately enough to reproduce.”

That, Ezra realized with a momentary stiffening, narrowed his options considerably. But if he were going to take one of Atlas’ prizes, he may as well take the one he knew for a fact that Atlas could not do without. She and Nico were a key and a lock, and Ezra, a person who trafficked in doors, knew one was no good without the other.

Libby had intuited his presence in the room before seeing him. She had keen hearing, and something had always alerted her to his presence. Echolocation, almost. She had known his entry to the house, had felt the disruption of time that he’d caused. For a moment, seeing her eyes change, Ezra suffered a twinge of remorse.

Only for a moment.

Taking her with him was an effort, one which was only narrowly possible given the limitations of his ability to travel. Convenient that she was so small, and so taken unawares. The only sound as they went through the door was her scream, which echoed from the place they’d left until they arrived where he’d intended, and then it ended with a spark, like a match flaring.

Libby spun from his grip and glared at him.

“Ezra, what the fuck—”

“It isn’t what you think,” he said quickly, because it wasn’t. If he could have taken one of the others, he would have. This wasn’t about her.

“Then tell me what to think!”

“I don’t have time to tell you everything,” he said, and summarized for her the basics: Atlas Blakely bad, Society bad, everything mostly bad, Libby gone for her own good.

She took it badly. “My own good? I told you not to decide that for me when we were together,” she snarled at him. “You certainly don’t get to decide it now!”

Appealing as it was to spend his time having another fight with his ex-girlfriend, Ezra didn’t currently have a lot of patience for a heart-to-heart. “Admittedly, there’s a lot of things about our relationship I’d like to change,” he told her briskly. “Most notably its inception. But seeing as I can’t—”

“It was all a lie.” Libby lifted a hand to her mouth. “My god, I believed you, I defended you—”

“It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t—” Ezra paused, clearing his throat. “Entirely true.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. In her defense, Ezra conceded, it was indeed a terrible answer. He had not improved much since their breakup at telling her things she wanted to hear—but in his defense, he’d never actually known the right things to say to begin with.

Gradually, Libby found her voice again.

“But you…” A pause. “You know everything about me. Everything.”

He had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. “Yes.”

“You know about my fears, my dreams, my regrets.” Her face paled. “My sister.”

“Yes.”

“I trusted you.”

“Libby—”

“It was real for me!”

“It was real for me, too.”

Most of it.

Some of it.

“Jesus, Ezra, did I even—?”

He watched Libby stop herself from asking if she had ever mattered to him, which was a brilliant idea as far as he was concerned. Even if she could have been satisfied with his answer (likely not), being made to question it at all would cause her irreparable harm. Libby Rhodes, whatever emotional insufficiencies she may have struggled with intrinsically, knew her limits, and she regarded them with abject tenderness, like fresh bruises.

“So why did you abduct me?” she demanded, half-stammering.

“Because of Atlas,” Ezra sighed. Now they were going in circles. “I told you. This isn’t about you.”

“But then—” Another pause. “Where did you take me?”

It was starting to settle in now, he suspected. The sensation of being held captive. The initial shock of being taken was starting to wear off, and soon she would start to consider the plausibility of escape.

“It isn’t,” Ezra began, “entirely a matter of where.”

He stopped before explaining himself any further. She was too clever, after all, and certainly too powerful not to replace her way out unless it remained a labyrinth, part of a maze she couldn’t see. People generally only knew how to look at the world one way: in three dimensions. For them, time was exclusively linear, moving in a single direction never to be disrupted or stopped.

Imagine looking for someone and knowing only that they were somewhere on earth. Now imagine looking for someone knowing only that they were on earth during a time with indoor plumbing. In short, nobody would replace her. Ideally, Libby Rhodes would even struggle to replace herself.

“You can’t keep me here,” she said. It was flat, unfaceted, deadly. “You don’t understand what I am. You never have.”

“I know exactly what you are, Libby. I’ve known for some time. Is the empath dead yet?”

She gaped at him.

“Is that a yes?” Ezra prompted.

“I don’t—how—” She was blinking rapidly. “You know about Callum?”

He set his jaw, taking it for a rhetorical question. Obviously he had already made his answer plenty clear. “Yes or no, Libby.”

“I don’t know,” she snapped, restless. “Yes, maybe—”

He was running late now, though punctuality was never a primary concern for him. He was often late to things, replaceing time to be such an arbitrary measure of motion. Even in his youth, which was admittedly both enormous and a mere sliver of things, he had never felt tasked by the prospect of arriving anywhere on time. His mother had wasted countless hours haranguing him about it, even on her very last day.

Though, perhaps that was what had drawn him to Atlas, in the end. Ezra knew how to starve, and Atlas knew how to wait.

“I’ll be back,” Ezra told Libby. “Don’t go anywhere.” Not that she could, even if she tried it. He’d built the wards specifically for her, made them molecular, soluble, water-based. She would have to alter the state of her environment in order to break them; to change the elements themselves individually, draining herself more with each step of progress. One step forward, two steps back.

Keys and locks.

“You’re keeping me here?” She sounded numbly disbelieving, though that would change. Numbness would pass, and pain would surely follow.

He lamented it. “It’s for your own safety,” he reminded her.

“From Atlas?”

“Yes, from Atlas,” he said, feeling a rush of urgency. He was running late, but again, that wasn’t the problem; it was what awaited him if he stayed.

Eventually the truth would sink in for Libby, and when it did, it was best to remove any flammable objects from the room, such as Ezra’s limbs and clothing.

“What,” Libby spat, “does Atlas Blakely need me for?”

Yes, there it was. The rage was settling in.

“You’d better hope you don’t replace out,” Ezra said, and then he departed for his meeting through a door, the sound of his careful stride echoing from the floors the moment they hit familiar marble.

He already knew who the room would contain when he entered it. Much like Atlas, Ezra had chosen its occupants carefully, using the contacts he had procured beneath the meticulous cover of his unremarkable face, his eradicated name. They all wanted to be found—were easily lured by the right price—and so the primary leaders from every enemy the Society had ever possessed would not have hesitated to reply to Ezra’s summons. They had been lured here by the promise of a single prize: the Society itself, which no one but Ezra had ever turned down.

Provided the animation worked, Ezra doubted Atlas would suspect him. But even if he did, it was Atlas who had made him invisible, and therefore impossible to replace.

“My friends,” Ezra said, striding in to address the room without preamble. “Welcome.”

If they were surprised to discover he was so young, they hid it well. They would not have known, after all, what to make of the summons they had received, each of which contained secrets from their youth as irreconcilable leverage. (Only people who exist in three dimensions ever believe history to be sacred. Keep that to yourself.)

“The six most dangerous human beings alive,” Ezra said to the room, “are, as you all know, currently in Atlas Blakely’s care. One has been neutralized, which should buy us some time, and another has been eliminated by the Society itself. But the other four will bear the enormity of either our extinction or survival—the chosen of a despotic Society for which we are little more than pawns. We have one year until they emerge again from its protection.”

The members of the room exchanged glances. Six of them, as Ezra found beautifully ironic. The synchronicity was so crisp that even Atlas would have appreciated it, had he known.

“What do you want us to do about them?” asked Nothazai, the first to speak.

Ezra smiled as Atlas would have shrugged.

“What else? Our world is dying,” he said, and took a seat, ready to put himself to work. “It’s up to us to set it right.”